Wednesday, October 31, 2007

William Edwards Deming

Prof. Ajith de Alwis distributed an article among us and asked us to read it. The article was about William Edwards Deming. But every one has forgotten to read it when he asked about it in today lecture. William Edwards Deming was an American statistician who worked on improving production improvements using statical process analysis. He was a college professor, author, lecturer, and consultant who did very big service to uplift production processes in manufacturing premises. He taught top management how to improve design (and thus service), product quality, testing and sales (the last through global markets). Initially this man was not taken into granted by US people but he worked with Japanese and taught them how to use his ideas for total quality management . He targeted sensible improvement with in five years but Japanese people were bright enough to caught his ideas and improved their product quality within four years. ("Japana Hapana", A sinhala saying [Japanese People are clever]).

American people got to know about this person when they search the secret behind the rapid increment on Japanese Product's quality. But when William Edwards Deming was only beginning to win widespread recognition in the U.S. at the time of his death.

This is very good lesson for us. We normally do not care about people who come up with new ideas and innovation. But they might have capacity to build up our country .